Getting married is a strange thing. Having spent months - or in some cases years - preparing for the event, the actual ceremony is disappointingly over in a blink of an eye. Or at least, it is if you’re the groom or bride.

It’s also incredibly expensive, even if you do try and keep the cost down.

Wedding Madness focuses on this pre-ceremony act of spending too much cash. In this case it involves dashing up and down the isles of a shopping mall grabbing whatever the unnamed bride can reach, rather than a more realistic (not to mention tedious) shopping list creator.

It’s just. Ah. A little crush. Ah.

In the main game mode, Crush, the player has one minute to sail around the shop floor, running over these items in order to beat a certain set score. The positions never change from challenge to challenge, so the trick is to find the best ‘line’ with high value items and power-ups.

The power-ups in question either add time (represented by a clock) or add a multiplier (a shopping trolley) to all items for a short period.

Whacking into another trolley before the original multiplier expires increases the amount, which not only garners more points but also speeds up your trolley making it harder to keep it from banging into the aisles.

Metal horse

Your trolley is a floaty beast to control, as is probably to be expected given a standard supermarket trolley’s handling.

Acceleration is automatic, and changing direction sends the hapless bride sliding across in a wide turning circle, forcing the player to think slightly ahead before making a move.

It’s a little jarring at first, but makes sense in the game as a whole. While the multiplier bonuses can make life a lot easier, the increased speed adds a pleasant element of risk to proceedings that wouldn’t be present if the controls were unbelievably snappy.

Cutting the honeymoon short

Despite the girly themes (hey, I’m a man, man) I found myself being sucked into Wedding Madness. One of the reasons why is that each new target score is pitched around that sweet spot in difficulty - it’s never impossible to reach, but can feel that way when you first encounter it.

However, despite the pitch-perfect difficulty Wedding Madness took almost all of 40 mins to complete in its entirety, bonus game modes and all.

Unlike with some games where I’d say the designers appear to have run out of ideas ten minutes in, I didn’t feel that it had quite reached its peak by the time the final floor came around.

Like the event itself, then, Wedding Madness is slightly hard to control but surprisingly enjoyable. Unfortunately, it’s over far quicker than you might think as well.